Rome, Italy
September 18, 2008
As climate change is credited as
one of the main drivers behind soaring food prices, the
Global Crop Diversity Trust
is undertaking a major effort to search crop collections—from
Azerbaijan to Nigeria—for the traits that could arm agriculture
against the impact of future changes. Traits, such as drought
resistance in wheat, or salinity tolerance in potato, will
become essential as crops around the world have to adapt to new
climate conditions.
Climate change is having the most negative impact in the poorest
regions of the world, already causing a decrease in yields of
most major food crops due to droughts, floods, increasingly
salty soils and higher temperatures.
Crop diversity is the raw material needed for improving and
adapting food crops to harsher climate conditions and constantly
evolving pests and diseases. However, it is disappearing from
many of the places where it has been placed for safekeeping—the
world’s genebanks. Compounding the fact that it is not well
conserved is the fact that it is not well understood. A lack of
readily available and accurate data on key traits can severely
hinder plant breeders’ efforts to identify material they can use
to breed new varieties best suited for the climates most
countries will experience in the coming decades. The support
provided by the Global Crop Diversity Trust will not only rescue
collections which are at risk, but enable breeders and others to
screen collections for important characteristics.
“Our crops must produce more food, on the same amount of land,
with less water, and more expensive energy,” said Cary Fowler,
Executive Director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust. “This, on
top of climate change, poses an unprecedented challenge to
farming. There is no possible scenario in which we can continue
to grow the food we require without crop diversity. Through our
grants we seek, as a matter of urgency, to rescue threatened
crop collections and better understand and conserve crop
diversity.”
Through a competitive grants scheme, the Trust will provide
funding for projects that screen developing country
collections—including wheat, chickpea, rice, barley, lentils,
coconut, banana, maize, and sweet potato—for traits that will be
essential for breeding climate-ready varieties. These projects
involve 21 agricultural research institutions in Argentina,
Bangladesh, Brazil, India, Israel, Mali, Nigeria, Niger,
Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Peru, the Philippines, South Africa,
Sri Lanka, and Syria.
Scientists will be screening chickpea and wheat collections in
Pakistan for traits of economic importance for farmers;
characterizing rare coconuts in Sri Lanka for traits of drought
tolerance and tolerance to other pests and diseases; screening
for salinity tolerance in sweet potatoes in Peru; and
identifying drought-tolerant bananas in India.
Much of the screening will take place within collections where
many of the unique samples are at risk. Therefore, in addition
to its efforts to bolster the development of climate-ready
crops, the Trust will provide funding to save unique crop
collections that are at risk of disappearing. Crop collections
need to be re-grown at regular intervals, and fresh seed
harvested and placed in seedbanks to ensure long-term
conservation and availability. The Trust is working with more
than 60 countries to “regenerate” unique collections of crops
critical for food security, and to ensure that they are
duplicated elsewhere for safety in a collection that meets
international standards, as well as in the Svalbard Global Seed
Vault.
Worldwide, there are a handful of crop collections that can be
said to meet international standards. And even these few,
despite their role in protecting the foundation of our food
supply, lurch from one funding arrangement to the next without
ever having any real long-term security. The Trust is now
endowing these, the world’s most important collections, ensuring
their conservation and availability for the future of
agriculture. Crops already being safeguarded by the Trust’s
pledge of financial security include banana, barley, bean,
cassava, faba bean, forages, grass pea, lentil, pearl millet,
rice, sorghum, taro, wheat and yam. These are housed in
collections managed in trust for humanity at eight agricultural
institutions that are supported by the Consultative Group on
International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) and by the
Secretariat for the Pacific Community.
“Secure funding on this sort of time-scale has been unheard of
in this field. Crop collections are all too often amassed and
then lost according to changing funding fashions and
priorities,” said Daniel Debouck, Head of the Genetic Resources
Unit at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture
(CIAT), one of the agricultural institutions supported by the
CGIAR. “Genebanking is not something you can turn on and off,
and a shortfall in funding of just a few months can result in
the permanent loss of unique varieties. We need to be sure that
we will have sufficient funding year after year after year. The
Trust is now providing that security.”
“The contents of our genebanks—some 1.5 million distinct
samples—are the result of a 13,000-year experiment in the
interaction between crops and environment, climate and culture,”
said Fowler. “If we are wise enough to conserve these
collections, we will have a treasure chest of the very traits
that crops used in the past when they successfully adapted to
new conditions—the traits they will need again in the future to
adapt as climates and environments change.”
The mission of the Trust is to ensure the conservation and
availability of crop diversity for food security worldwide.
Although crop diversity is fundamental to fighting hunger and to
the very future of agriculture, funding is unreliable and
diversity is being lost. The Trust is the only organization
working worldwide to solve this problem, and has already raised
over $140 million. |
|
